Revamping my goals

After a busy and emotionally draining weekend, I'm now back to work — more or less. I have a lot of non-work activities planned for this week, particularly because my mom is on vacation and wants to spend some time with me. So I'll be in and out a bit all week.

Anyway, after my successes and failures with my experiment in productivity, and after setting a record for 2009 with my July income, I decided it was time to revamp my goals a little bit.

This came partly from realizing that while increasing my productivity was increasing my income, there were still many things that I wanted to do that weren't getting done. For instance, I've been wanting to finish a long-overdue update to my website, and ever since we got back from Europe in March I've been meaning to start working on fiction a little bit every day. And what good is increasing my productivity if I can't achieve some of these goals as well? I'm a person, not a factory drone.

To address this issue, I've decided to rework some of my goals. I want to increase my marketing activities, as I've grown a bit lax in that department in the last year or two, and I also want to be sure that I work on my own projects (fiction as well as my blogs) regularly.

Here are the changes I plan on making to my schedule:

1) Making Monday an admin day. I really liked spending Monday on administrative tasks last Monday. Things like my email inbox tend to get rather out of hand if I don't set aside a dedicated block of time for managing them. Once those types of things are done, this day can also be spent on marketing and working ahead on my blogs.

2) Spending an hour every weekday on marketing. This time will be spent on website updates until I get those finished. After that, I'll spend it on checking job boards, writing queries, blogging, etc. — anything that leads to new clients.

3) Setting aside an hour every day for my own projects. This also includes blogging to some extent, but primarily I'm thinking of the novel ideas I'm always outlining and a couple of ebooks I've been wanting to write.

If I can work these things into my schedule, plus work about four billable hours a day Tuesday through Friday, I should be able to meet all of my goals — income, career, and personal writing!